


The Summer House

by starkadder



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Brief Smut, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Possession, post season two
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-23
Updated: 2016-02-04
Packaged: 2018-05-15 17:30:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5793529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkadder/pseuds/starkadder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Exorcised of the Dean's influence, Perry is to spend the summer quarantined in a remote house with Mattie watching over her in case of a recurrence. Still in shock over her possession, she must deal with her missing memories, a dislocated sense of identity and the inescapably disturbing presence of Mattie herself.</p><p>In her head – or over her shoulder – she feels like something is stalking her, and does not know whether it is the Dean returning or her own psyche catching up with her. Or maybe it’s just the approach of Matska Belmonde, who is beginning to exert a fascination over her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Summer House

_She can feel an itching at the back of her head. It scurries about as if little legs are running over her scalp and if she doesn't concentrate hard she can feel it moving forward, flowing over her chin and around her temples, plucking at her cheekbones. In its wake it leaves numb flesh._

_Day by day it gets worse and worse until eventually the flowing is coming across her eyes. Her vision grows hazy, and the images before her jolt and shift like cuts in a film. There are gaps between them she does not remember. Words come out of her mouth but she is not speaking them. Her lips speak on in a language she does not know, and with each word her own feeling of herself melts away to leave somebody different standing in her place._

_She is tumbled into dreams, and there are visions she hopes are dreams. There is a dead man in the shadows, and the crows are eating her on the table, and Danny Lawrence sits up with a deeply sucked-in breath. Soldiers come to her dressed in black, gates under the earth evaporate under the poured blood. War, and fire, and always the blood – and then somehow she is caught writhing in an invisible web with familiar figures scurrying around her and shouting._

_She is rocked by an earthquake and screams, and she realises with sudden clarity that it really is she who is screaming while somebody else is torn away. The itching in her scalp has returned but is moving away as if she is rising out of deep water, and her mouth is free and her eyes are free and then she falls backwards. Strong arms catch and hold her. There is murmuring of different voices around her, names and questions. She ignores them and rolls back into the arms that keep her. Groggily she opens her eyes._

_“Welcome home, Betty Crocker.”_

* * *

The house is built of yellowish stone and of indeterminate age. It straggles unsymmetrically, jutting out in all directions with a tangle of porches, balconies and casements. There are flowered creepers crawling up walls and winding themselves around railings, hanging streamers of purple blooms down to brush against the top of Lola's head. She places a hand against the sharply-cut stone of the wall, feeling the grain of the rock.

“This is yours?” she asks. It wasn't what she had expected.

“This is mine,” Matska confirms. “At least when I'm in this part of the world, which is not often.” She retrieves a brass key from somewhere about her person.

“It's not very... vampiric.”

Matska laughs. “A Gothic castle would have attracted attention round here, darling. Besides, I didn't build it.”

“Well, it's nice. I like it.” The best kind of place to get away from things. And her imaginings of a summer with Matska Belmonde were a lot worse than a honey-coloured mansion in beautiful French countryside.

“Thank you. Although you may think less of it when we're inside. As I say, I'm hardly ever here and a lot of the place is as it was when I bought it in the forties. I mostly just use it for a refresher on longer journeys.” Matska pushes open the front door and Lola follows her in across the terracotta tiled floor. The hallway is sparse with only a rickety wooden table and rattan mat. The walls are papered in faded dusty reds and browns curling in indeterminate, vaguely-floral patterns.

The drawing-room seems to be the centre of the inhabited circuit. Unlike the near emptiness of other rooms that Lola glimpses through doorways, this is well furnished with a miscellaneous collection of chairs, tables and cabinets. Leading off from it is the dining room, all formality and carved oak, and also a large set of French windows overlooking the garden.

“Everything up to the stone wall is mine,” she informs Lola proudly.

“I can't see a stone wall.” The expanse of lawn, cut through by flowerbeds, flows out for a hundred yards at least before coming up against huddles of trees. A bright green hedge, head-high, forms the boundary of the garden to the left and right but no wall is visible.

“Precisely,” Matska smiles.

Upstairs there are a collection of bedrooms. Lola's is small and comfortable if old-fashioned. White-painted iron bedstead, flowery thin coverlet, an oval mirror almost dwarfing a spindly pretty dressing stand. The window looks out over the garden and she can see from this height that the trees are not so continuous as they appeared from the drawing room. There is indeed a hint of a wall of the same yellowish stone winding its way through them at a distance. 

Somebody must have been taking care of the grounds at least in Matska's absence. The lawn in not manicured and the hedges are not quite square, but the garden does not have the same air of decrepitude that much of the house does.

“Everything you need?”

“Yes. Yes, thank you.” As Matska turns to go she adds in a rush, “Thank you for doing this, Ms. Belmonde. It's- I know we... well. Thank you.”

Matska makes a sort of ironic bow.

“My pleasure, dear. I don't play hostess as much as I would like. But you could call me Mattie in the circumstances.” She turns to go. “I'm three doors down if you need me.”

The hostess manner annoys her. It's not as if they are friends. If it weren't for the possibility – however remote – of there being a bit of the Dean still left she would have had no regrets never seeing Matska Belmonde again. If she has her way she will get through the summer as fast as possible and then live the rest of her life without having to deal with that smugly gleaming smile.

Not that she isn't grateful - it was after all Mattie who found a way to trap her and Mattie who with the help of LaFontaine and J.P. conjured up a way to extract the Dean and exile her in the same way she exiled Tythia all those centuries ago. But she would rather not have to be grateful to the monster who tried to kill her, who threatened her, who would have thought noting of turning the campus into a bloodbath. Mattie may not actually have killed the newspaper kids, but she would have felt no compunction if she had.

The politeness bothers her particularly. It's better than death threats but Lola does not want her to be too agreeable. In that case she might be expected to like her, and the day Lola Perry likes vampires is the day she fails to be Lola Perry any more. (J.P. doesn't count. He's more than a vampire, so she is allowed to like him.)

She sits down on the bed with a clunk and breathes out deeply. Shuts her eyes. Stills her mind. Nothing there. She opens her eyes again. No soft roaring noise gradually getting louder. No unidentifiable itch scurrying along the inside of her skull. No lurches in her balance, no sudden spells of dizziness. The Dean really is gone from inside her. Cured.

And now quarantined with her doctor. She understands the reasoning. The possibility of the slightest trace of the Dean or link to her place of exile cannot be guarded against heavily enough - and so Mattie prescribed a summer in one of her scattered houses, alone and watched over. She thinks that Laura and Carmilla were secretly relieved despite the former's protests - able now to go hide somewhere alone and work over the tangles of their relationship in peace. LaFontaine had been harder to persuade, but they accepted the logic as they accept all logic. J.P. is taking care of them. Nobody knows where Danny has gone, but she promised Laura she would come back, and took Kirsch with her. They packed outdoor equipment and Carmilla sealed the peace with her new sister by pressing into her hands a list of understanding blood bank clerks.

The chair in front of the dressing table is stiff and made of creaky cane with an inadequate cushion. Lola tries to sink into it and faces the mirror.

“My name is Lola Perry,” she says to the glass. “I was here before the Dean, and I am here again now that she's gone.” Her reflection looks back at her sceptically.

“It's true,” she informs it. “I'm the same girl I was before. I haven't been changed.”

Lola stares into the mirror. The bruising around her temples is now gone without a trace, but a thin scar cuts her right eyebrow in two. On the one hand, her face is more or less as it had been, but on the other hand there seems something to it that is not quite familiar. Despite what she keeps telling herself, she is not sure she is entirely at home in it any more.

* * *

“You never did tell me why all your little friends call you by your surname,” Matska asks over the bread and cheese at lunch. They have been eating in silence up to this point and Lola was rather getting used to it. The summer might seem long, but you could map it out in meals. Ten weeks is seventy days is seventy awkward lunches and seventy tense dinners. So – glance at the clock – in about twenty minutes she will be one-seventieth of the way through the lunches. That's more than one percent: measurable progress towards getting away from Matska Belmonde.

“Well, there was this other Lola at school,” she explains once she is unable to string out the quiet any longer, “so we got called by our surnames to tell us apart. And then when I came to Silas, almost every time I met someone I was with Su- _LaFontaine_ , so they introduced me to everyone as Perry. It stuck - except for the people I met without LaFontaine around of course. Mel still calls me Lola.” 

She and Mel only ran into each other about once a semester after what happened in first year. Each time they did, they both cautiously asked how the other was doing and then quickly made an excuse to go. When Lola got a flying mark in her first year mythology exam, Mel clapped her on the back - and that was the extent of their acquaintance until the campus civil war. She had been surprised and touched when Mel had come to see her after the Dean's exorcism and sat silently by her bed for an hour.

“Shame to drag you away from your joined-at-the-hip scientist, then. Might lose track of your name.” Lola grinds her teeth at the mockery in Mattie's voice. She is hoping that she will get used to it before long and so will be able to ignore it, but that day has not yet come.

“I'm sure it'll be fine,” she says shortly.

“Of course, Lola.” Mattie plucks a bunch of grapes out of the basket and pops one into her mouth. For some reason, Lola finds the gesture infuriating. She finds herself retrieving the second bunch and tearing the small purple grapes off the stem with enough force to burst some. Mattie's eyes flick down to her stained hands. She can feel the tension. She speaks and acts like she is holding a brimming cup of water. Any untoward movement and it might spill. 

Mattie pours a glass of wine and pushes it across the table to Lola. “The cellar is the one part of the building I had extended and improved,” she informs her.

“First things first?” Lola tastes the wine. It tastes like she imagined wine should when she was young, before she and LaFontaine began confiscating vinegary half-bottles from the first-years.

Mattie smiles. “Special long-term blood storage units take a surprising amount of space.” Lola very carefully doesn't react to that. But as it sets the cogs whirring, she feels she must check.

“You've got enough, though?”

“Don't fret, there's plenty. There's a couple of weeks supply and next week I'll fly over to Périgueux and visit a man in the hospital's blood bank.” Seeing Lola's confused expression she adds, “fly as in crows, darling.”

“Ah.”

“So your pretty little neck is safe.”

“Good!” she says, more abruptly than she would have liked. “Not that it would be the first time.”

The two of them lapse into silence. After she has finished devouring the grapes, Mattie sighs. 

“I hope you're not going to be so uncooperative for the whole summer, Lola. My patience will wear thin for sure.”

“Maybe I'll just go, then.” Lola mutters. “Get out of your hair and let you get back to swanning around making casual death threats and-”

“You're staying here, Lola. We agreed. You may be having second thoughts and I may not be overly enthused at the prospect of you sulking – but you are staying. And it'll be much more pleasant for both of us if we manage to co-exist. So: anything you want to say. Get it off your chest now.” She puts her hands on her hips and cocks her head. Lola takes a deep breath, opens her mouth- and then shuts it again before trying a second time.

“You rescued me. I'm grateful, I really am-”

“But you don't trust me. Or maybe you don't like the thought of being grateful to me.” 

That one hits close to home. Lola really doesn't like the idea of owing her life to Matska. It makes her feel complicit in the woman and all the death and violence she represents. She can't say that, though, and instead she gulps the last of her wine and slams the glass back onto the table. 

“You're a _vampire_. You've tried to kill me, and several of my friends, and you only got your fucking _Mother_ out of my head because you were saving your own skin as well. So you don't need to go around pretending to be the glamorous hostess and acting like you're actually interested, right? We can just do this summer and then get out of-”

“Oh Lola,” Matska pouts. “What have I ever done to deserve this attack?”

“You tried to tear my throat open,” she snaps. _That_ memory is still vivid at least.

“Because you doused me in holy water, sweetheart. It was painful and ruining my favourite top.” Matska brushes imaginary dust off her sleeve.

Lola feels all her anger at the injustice of this whole thing bubbling up. How dare Matska act aggrieved? “You went on a killing rampage! What was I supposed to do, put my friends at risk?”

“Oh, you take things so personally! Have I ever _once_ brought up the fact that you staked my brother?” Matska leans closer and Lola grits her teeth.

“You didn't even like your brother. He was a murderous slimeball and you-” Matksa raises an eyebrow. “Well you're just murderous!”

There is a slight smirk on the vampire's face, as if she's not taking this quite seriously.

“Be that as it may, I tore Mother out of your head and saved the world. Surely a girl's due the benefit of the doubt after that?” She cocks her head.

“I saved the world from the return of Tythia,” Lola shoots back. “And I wasn't even saving myself at the time. One for one payback – fair's fair.”

“You caused the return of Tythia in the first place, darling. No points for that. And while my normal policy is to snap the neck of people who talk back to me in this fashion, that would rather defeat the point of us being here. We might as well try co-existence.

“And I'm still one point up on you, little girl.”

Lola says nothing. It's not fair. But then maybe co-existence is better than a fight to the death.

“Oh, all right. I'm sorry about the holy water,” she mutters. “In my defence, I was suffering from a mild case of possession.” Mattie beams at her.

“And in return, I shall once again assure you that your neck is quite safe from any more non-consensual biting.” She sits back in her chair and takes up her glass again. “Well, Lola, are we done?”

Lola nods, not meeting her eyes. The two of them focus on the wine.

“I was quite impressed by the holy water incident, you know,” says Mattie after a while. Lola looks at her quizzically. “I mean it! Do you know how rare it is for someone to actually plan to kill me? Usually people only get to that point when I’m busy killing them and their options have run out.”

Lola realises her mouth is open. “Are you… complimenting me? On attempted murder?”

“Darling, I’m a connoisseur!” 

Lola snorts. Being complimented on one’s murder attempt shouldn’t make her feel better, but somehow it does. Better than being a victim who needs to be coddled. Or a patient who might relapse.

* * *

There are gaps in her memory. This is probably a blessing in some sense – she has heard enough of what the Dean did while in control of her body not to want to remember it first-hand. But, like the irresistible urge to prod and poke at a loose tooth or pick at a scab, she can’t help straining her memory in quiet moments in case she might find something. It doesn’t help that she dreams of what might have happened and wakes unable to know whether truth had been mixed into the fantasy.

She steps onto a dusty path leading out from the house. On either side of the path’s end, like a symbolic gate, is a small pile of the same yellowish stone of which the house is built. The edges of the stones are crumbled into sandy dust and Lola wonders whether these are the kind of rocks that have fossils in. She knows little enough about fossils but LaFontaine has paused at enough road cuttings and bouldery outcrops on holidays for some of it to have reluctantly sunk in. 

There is a kind of fossil called a mould, where a creature’s body has been dissolved and disappeared to leave a hole in the rock. LaFontaine has shown them to her, empty spaces of air in the shape of the shell that was once there. And yet the rock around retains the shape, accommodating itself to the missing part. She wonders whether she might become like this, recognizing the edges of the memories which are no longer there.

The garden is full of life despite the heat. She meanders through a stand of thirsty fruit trees and watches a flock of goldfinches squabbling over whatever it is they have found on a bare patch of ground. Their little red caps bob wildly amid the flashes of yellow from their wings.

A slight breeze picks up as she walks along the hedge and the broad leaves flutter in the wind, casting shifting shadows on the ground before her. From somewhere inside it she can hear the piping of little birds, but she can't see them. It occurs to her that if she moved softly and quietly enough she would be able to lie on the ground and inch her way inside the hedge. Then, lying on the ground, birds would hop and chirp around her like a halo. She could merge into the hedge, tangles and branches weaving their way around her until she took root herself, plunging her feet into the soil to grasp buried stones. What would people see as they walked by? Some human shape mixed into the hedgerow shadows? Or would she have merged so completely that they would be unable to tell where the clipped beech shrubs ended and the woman began?

There would be something just not quite right about the shadow.

If Lola stares at it in the right way, there is something just not quite right about the shadow. She can tilt her head just so, and the dancing shades line up a little too neatly. They begin to look like embroidered patterns, some harlequinade fabric. Like curtains, and they move and bulge like somebody is on the other side. And there – a little split shape, a rent in the curtain. Once she sees it, branches line up into the beginnings of arms and hints of hands-

\- and this is nonsense. It is the interplay of shadows from a hedge. Get a hold of yourself Lola, she thinks. You need something to occupy your mind.

She empties the kitchen cupboards. There is a lot of dust in their corners, and a bag of flour has clearly been pillaged by mice sometime in the last decade. There is a lot of kitchen equipment, although most of it is slightly tacky to the touch - the effect of years spent growing damp in the winter and then drying out in the summer to leave a residue behind. Most of it needs only a quick dump in hot soapy water followed by a wipe-down, so she handles the cutlery first. This is done quickly, and the stacks of newly-shining knives and forks gives her a sense of progress to spur her onto the next stage. The cooking pots are soaked in vinegar solution before taking the plunge, and while they sit noxiously stripping out the footprints of spiders she scrapes and scrubs out the drawers.

Cleaning helps her think. The key to surviving a long summer, perhaps, is to create order and establish roles. 

Under her vigorous scrubbing dusty hooks are revealed to be brass and the capacious sink starts to approximate porcelain white once more. As the cleaning progresses, she reorganizes the storage. She doesn’t know if the original organization was Mattie’s own choice, but it seems unlikely. Lola imposes her own personality on the pantry and by the time Mattie drifts in the door followed by billowing folds of silk, she has a new kitchen to back her up.

“Having fun, darling?” Mattie, lolling in the doorway all polished and smooth, looks like she has never handled a pan in her life. There is a wine glass smudged with bloodstains in her hand.

Lola takes a breath. “Thought I’d clean up a bit,” she says, retrieving a stack of fine white china bowls from the sink and beginning to dry them one by one.

“That's very good of you. Thank you, Lola.” Mattie’s manner is straight out of an etiquette guide, her voice precise and without warmth.

“And I’d like to cook,” she adds. “I mean, while we’re here. If it’s all right with you. It’ll give me something to do and I can stay out of your hair.” 

“Trying to avoid me, Lola?” Mattie draws closer but she focuses her attention on stacking bowls. 

“No, I just- I’d like to do something. To, you know, justify me being here.” She raises her face to meet Mattie’s eyes. The vampire’s expression is inscrutable at first, but before Lola can drop her gaze and withdrawn into herself, she gives a small nod and a ghost of a smile appears on her face. 

“Not interested in the life of a patient? Dozing on couches and wandering languidly in the garden in your nightdress holding no appeal for you?” 

Lola decides this foray of sarcasm probably means the peace offering has been accepted and responds in kind. “Think I’ll avoid anything stereotypically associated with being a vampire’s victim if it’s all the same to you,” she says. Mattie chuckles.

“Very well, chef,” she declares, “You may turn the kitchen into your personal fiefdom. What shall I do with this?” She waves the bloodstained wine glass in her right hand.

Allowing herself a moment’s self-congratulation for her performance, Lola slips into the role. “Bloody glasses on the left by the sink, Mattie. You’ll find a stack of excess saucers over there.” She points at the pile on the window-sill. “So use those to cover the glasses up - I’m not having an infestation of flies in my kitchen.

“Dinner will be at seven, although tonight it’ll only be a light supper. Tomorrow I’ll have something more expansive prepared.”

Mattie sets her glass on the left by the sink, ostentatiously placing a saucer over the top to keep the flies out of the blood and as she flows smoothly out of the room with a beaming smile, Lola thinks that this summer might be bearable after all if only they can keep the roles up.


	2. Domestic Bliss

_In her dream, she is walking through a labyrinth. The rough stone walls are streaked with soot and there is a pale light wafting down through grates set in the ceiling. She cannot see clearly what is above the roof and focuses on her footsteps crunching the gritty dusty beneath her feet. At intervals along the walls are alcoves and as she walks past she begins to look into them. Each recess would be just large enough for her to fit herself into were it not for the shelf two-thirds of the way up. The shelves are carved of the same dirty stone as the rest of the maze and they are empty._

_Then, in the shifting way that dreams have, they are not empty. There are faces on the shelves – cunningly made masks of such quality as to bewilder her. They look as if they are sleeping and waiting to be awoken, and it is only the black absences were their eyes should be that reveal their true nature. Some of the faces are those of people she knows. Danny Lawrence's face sits on one shelf, her hair so fine and soft in its neat plait. Through the eye holes of the mask, Lola can see cracks in the wall behind. She strokes Danny's cheek. Despite her slight dimples the mask is cold and hard like porcelain. She cannot see – or does not think to see – how the hair is joined to the hard china._

_She passes on, pausing every now and again when a shelf contains a familiar face. There is no surprise in the dream and each exploration is made in the calm expectation of its result. When she picks on the mask of J.P. there is a second one behind it with a pale, round face. She finds Matska Belmonde and marvels at the precision with which the fine ceramic has brought forth the subtle angles of her cheekbones. She turns the mask round in her hands to reveal the plain white inside, and puts on Mattie's face. When she removes it, she turns it to face the wall._

_Finally she reaches the end of the curving passage. There on the back wall is the last alcove. And on the shelf, as she knew it would be, is her own face. At first she stands there looking into the empty eyes. But a realisation steals over her and carefully she raises her hands to where her own face should be. Her hands grasp only empty air. Her neck terminates abruptly and there is no flesh or bone to grasp. Panic seizes her. She grabs at the mask on the shelf, meaning to replace her missing face, but it slips and shatters on the stone floor into pieces of pottery._

* * *

“Perr!” cries LaFontaine when they pick up the phone. “I've been waiting for you to call for the last four days!” Lola feels their voice wash over her. All is well.

“Oh, I wish I could have called sooner but the signal here was just too poor,” she says. “I spent this morning desperately standing in the middle of every room on the top floor waving my phone about till I found somewhere I could call from.” LaFontaine laughs. No doubt they would have figured out how to hack into satellite broadband within five minutes.

“How's Cougar Town treating you?”

“She's... okay. Seems to be taking the route that doesn't involve death threats, so that's good. I'm staying out of her way as much as I can.”

“You'd say if it were too much, right Perr?”

“I would. But it's okay, it really is. We had to get a few things sorted first, but now that's done it's all good. And it's a really nice house. How is Silas?”

Silas, it turns out, is in a state of tense peace. The Zetas are dealing with their internal dispute between the traditionalists and Kirsch's reform faction – not helped by their respective leaders both being missing and one being a vampire. The Summers who survived are watchful and isolated under Mel's leadership. Unexpectedly, the Alchemy Club has emerged as the party best able to maintain order helped by their close association with the remaining faculty. LaFontaine is apparently held in high regard by them. Lola is glad that they are getting the recognition they deserve.

She remembers when she was in first year and terrified that LaFontaine – Susan, as they were then – would leave her. Lola had been convinced that at some point she would run out things to say to them and so LaFontaine would just run out of interest and get bored. Which was tragic because Lola knew she could never get bored of them – despite her huffing and complaining about the endless stream of new projects, she finds it endlessly fascinating that LaFontaine can find so many things endlessly fascinating.

“Now that things are cleared up, I've even had a bit of time for the clarinet again. And the Dean's house has some good soundproofed rooms for practice, so Jeep's relieved about that.”

“You'll get better.” Lola never knew exactly why it was that they had decided to learn the clarinet. She has a suspicion that her friend wanted to surprise their parents, who had always been slightly put out that their only child had inherited none of their musical genes. Or maybe it was just the desire to do something unexpected.

Not that Lola has ever wanted to do something just because it would be unexpected.

* * *

She stands on the lawn and looks at the house. There are three floors – the large windows on the ground floor mark the drawing room, the dining room, the library, her kitchen and all the other unused rooms. Above them are the ranks of bedrooms. Hers is a little out of view around the side, but that one there might be Mattie’s. Thin dimity curtains crowd the panes and flutter in the breeze where the windows are opened. On the upper floor are many small, cramped windows. These are jumbled and disordered – poking out of casements or caught between the angled walls without a view. Servant’s quarters probably, once upon a time.

They are the kind of windows at which faces appear in ghost stories, she reflects. Although in a ghost story it would probably be a misty evening rather than the full brightness of day, and the wind would be whistling rather than gently stirring the branches of the fruit trees.

But then there could be a face all the same, couldn’t there? Leering out of one of the casements and then whenever you looked straight at it, it would disappear and the reappear at another window. She darts her glance quickly at each in turn – nothing.

Of course there is nothing. But if there had been, the treacherous and unavoidable speculation in her head starts, if there had been – who would it have been?

There was a bell tower at Silas which popular rumour had was haunted. LaFontaine had attempted to investigate it in their second year, once they had started to accept the weirdness of the campus and were getting interested. The trouble was, they had explained, nobody could agree on what it was haunted by. Some students maintained that it had been an old woman looking for her children, others that the spectre was of an ancient monk with eyes peeled to see your sin. A large number believed it to contain a clown puppet.

After extensive experiments their final, remarkable suggestion was that the tower itself was not haunted at all but instead contained some powerful emptiness which compelled visitors to – as they put it – ‘haunt it themselves’. Faced with such a blankness on a psychic level, the intruder’s subconscious would try to eradicate the emptiness by populating it with some suitable presence.

That is an alarming idea, now that she thinks about it. There is quite enough jostling in her head at the moment without wondering if there's anything left of the Dean's haunting presence in it. She tries to think back to when she first felt there was something wrong. What were the symptoms, when she was still aware enough to pick them up? The itching, yes, and the memory blanks and the dreams...

The trouble with dreams is that she has enough traumatic ones at the moment to qualify as symptoms for a dozen possessions. But there's no itching – except when she thinks about itching, but that's the human condition. 

She scans the windows carefully again. If there is a residual presence, maybe it will show up in the corner of her eye just as she looks away-

“What are you looking for, Lola?”

Mattie appears smoothly at her side, face upraised to the top floor windows.

“It’s nothing,” she says hurriedly, directing her gaze downwards.

“Been watching you for a while. It’s not nothing. See something?”

Lola shuffles her feet. “No. But- I keep thinking I might. If I just stare a bit longer something will appear.”

“And I’m sure I can guess what it is you’re expecting.” She swivels to face her. “Mother is gone, Lola. She’s not coming back. She’s imprisoned, just like she did to Tythia and all the others like her.”

“If you were sure about that I wouldn't be here. You're not sure, and that chance is still enough to scare you.”

“It's the limits of possibility. Let it lie.”

Lola twitches and her voice comes fast and sharp. “But I brought her back, Mattie! I brought Tythia back with a wish. Do you see?”

“But you’re not wishing for Mother’s return.”

“But I could! What if I do it accidentally? What if it’s like the way you can’t help thinking about stepping off the edge of a cliff? What if it’s like trying not to think about pink elephants? I need to know.”

“You’re just feeling lost, darling. And you’re trying to convince yourself there’s someone out there who’s making you feel like this. But there isn’t.”

“I just- It's difficult because I keep trying to remember who I was before all this stuff started happening so I can compare. Before Tythia, and the Dean, and staking- well, you know. What it was like to not have all this stuff around me. Only I can't.” There are tears beginning to gather in her eyes as it comes rushing out and she doesn't want to cry in front of Mattie.

Part of Lola still wants to flinch when the woman lays a hand on her shoulder, but right now most of her is just happy to lean into the contact and let herself be walked back to the house without looking up.

* * *

Vampires, Lola reflects, are unexpected creatures. Her abiding memory of Mattie is of the woman appearing suddenly behind her streaked with blood and with murder in her eyes. At the present time however, she has apparently raided the library and is lying sprawled on the lawn surrounded by dozens of books. She has thrown her shoes off and is crossing and re-crossing her legs behind her. It is oddly distracting.

“Catching up on Twilight?” she asks. She notes abstractedly to herself that she would never have said something like that several days before when they had just arrived here.

“Oh, sarcasm. You must be feeling better. Try irony next, it'll suit your eyes.” Mattie tosses her book backwards for Lola to catch. It is a thin novella in dense embossed blue paper.

“ _La Paix du Ménage_ ,” Lola reads. “Honoré de Balzac.”

“ _Domestic Bliss_ ,” Mattie translates for her. Lola makes a face.

“Please tell me the title is ironic – I don't think I could cope with the millenium-old murder machine reading stories of happy couples.” She sits down cross-legged on the grass next to Mattie.

“One can't spend every day on a killing spree, Lola. A girl has to find something to fill the quieter moments with, and I don't like knitting.”

“And there I was thinking you were 'death on dark wings'.”

“Oh I am, Lola. You have no idea.” She looks very serious all of a sudden and Lola is briefly afraid she has made a mistake and been over-familiar. But then Mattie's face shifts back to indulgent and she adds “But that's tiring and consistency is of no interest to me. Besides, the title _is_ ironic. A masked ball, an attempted seduction, a case of mistaken identity.”

“Sounds a bit more plausible, then.” She fiddles with the hem of her skirt. “I thought Carmilla was the bookworm of the family.”

Mattie rolls sideways to lie facing her. “Oh, she is. I have merely lived a thousand years and done a lot of reading during that time; Kitty-cat has _spent_ three hundred years reading. And of course she goes in for all the drawn-out navel-gazing through the medium of literature. So yes, Carmilla is the bookworm of the family.”

“Up to now,” Lola points out. J.P. will presumably give her a run for her money.

“Up to now. Though the Encyclopedia might be a little more detached from what he reads. I do hope I never again have to break into a philosopher's house after his death to tear certain pages out of his notebooks.” She rolls her eyes. “Mircalla still has them somewhere, you know – the missing portion of Albert Camus' notebooks. He wrote down all about the young woman who found him in a bar in Algiers in 1952 and what she very indiscreetly said to him there. Could have been a close-run thing if they had been published.”

Lola giggles. “You got over the teen hero-worship years ago, did you?”

Mattie nods sagely. “I read strictly for pleasure. After all, why do anything for any other reason?” She smiles at Lola, who feels suddenly how much there is to her. No doubt it comes of having lived so long and gone through so many transformations. 

“So Balzac? Tell me,” she asks, and Mattie sets about it. 

As she speaks, she draws herself up to sit and hugs her knees close. Her eyes are large and dark, and they are lit with a different light than the fierce glow Lola has seen before. She talks about the vast, interlocking lives of the cast – an attempt to translate the whole of society onto a page. The lives of people – so small and repetitive on the surface – open up into more and more layers and folds, like origami. Like a bird's eye view taking in time as well as space. Like a vampire's eye view.

Mattie has spoken of people before as livestock. But it occurs to Lola now that maybe if one has nothing to do but wade through a cattle market for centuries one might start to become a connoisseur of the dumb creatures, even if one does eat them.

“And Paris! He write about Paris like it's a living creature, like he can feel is breathe... it does breathe, Lola, I've seen it rise spluttering from a muddy backwater and become a jewel. I never saw a village with more than ten houses until I was thirty years old, but-” she breaks off and looks away.

I have embarrassed her, Lola realises. She didn't mean to say that much and now she feels like she's dropped her mask.

“Got any Jane Austen?” She tries to break the tension. There are piles of books, but all with French titles. “No, I suppose not.”

“Jane Austen. How… domestic,” Mattie comments, moving back into her accustomed manner. “The literary equivalent of tidiness. I might have guessed.”

“Wit and a sharp sense of human foibles,” Lola contradicts her, “and the tidiness is in the perfectly fitted presentation.”

“If you’re interested in pining after Mr Darcy.” Mattie wrinkles her nose in disgust before adding impishly, “or Miss Darcy in some cases. Hmm?” 

Lola ignores this last attempt at subtlety.

“Mr Darcy is hardly the type to be worth- wait a moment. You haven’t actually read her, have you?” She sticks her nose up triumphantly. “You, Matska Belmonde, are trying to pretend you’ve read things you haven’t in order to act superior. I call that petty social climbing.”

“You are rude and presumptuous, Lola.”

“I’m right and presumptuous, _Mattie_.”

“Fine! What have I missed?”

“Perfectly-crafted social comedies in which sharply formed characters learn to get over themselves. A cold and satirical gaze at the pretensions of society coupled with warm-hearted regard for those caught up in it. Love stories in which the obstacles are the lovers’ own projections of themselves. And all tidily set out and prettily phrased.”

“You sound like an English essay.”

“I wrote my first year English literature coursework on Jane Austen. I had to rewrite it at the very last minute because I found out that Danny Lawrence was working on the same argument as me and she was clearly going to do it better and be marked first. L for Lawrence before P for Perry. So I didn’t want to sound like a poor second.

“Anyway, I stayed up all night for three nights running and wrote a new one. It still probably wasn’t as good as Danny’s, but it was more original.” She catches Mattie's gaze and falters, embarrassed. “I didn’t want to leave it to chance, is all! It was my grade at stake.”

Mattie starts to laugh. “You are a curious creature, Lola.”

* * *

The top floor is not as dark as she expected when Lola creeps up the rough wooden staircase. It is dry, and the air is warm and stale with the wafting up of heat from below. There are skylights in many of the rooms letting in yellowish shafts of sun in which she can follow dancing sparks of dust. It is a bare floor even by the neglected standards of the rest of the house. Once it seems to have been servants’ quarters – there are small rickety beds, spindly cane chairs, chipped enamel jugs lying on the floor. There are also old store cupboards filled with bric-a-brac from a hundred different sources and what seems to be a former school room, smelling of sawdust and with a smudged blackboard at one end.

Lola wonders who had the house before Mattie. If she had bought it sixty or seventy years ago, it is possible that children taught in these room are still alive. Maybe in some nursing home in Périgueux, or settled happily in a newer corner of the world surrounded by noisy grandchildren. What would they say if they knew their favourite armchair was being slumped in by a vampire who was old before their childhood home was even thought of? 

Lola thinks that she would feel it as something of a violation. She remembers going home to her parents after that first year at university and unexpectedly being taken to visit old friends of theirs in a part of the city she had not seen for over a decade. They had taken a walk, and she realized as they passed a little park that this very spot had been where she and LaFontaine once found a lost baby bird and bickered over what to do with it. Then it had been a small scrap of wasteland overgrown with lilac and buddleia. Now it was all cleared with neatly mown grass and bark chipping paths, and she felt an irrational stab of anger that something of her own could be so obliterated like that. 

There is a creaking of the floor in the next room and Lola freezes. As she does so, she knows that it is absurd. The floor here creaks and groans constantly in the assault of the dry summer heat. Has she not lain awake each night since she got here listening to the settling of the boards? If she were to go and look, the next room would be empty.

But if she goes to look she will also be admitting the possibility, however remote, that she thinks it might _not_ be.

So she has to stay here. Stay here as the silence returns and no second creak can be heard. _But then the silence signifies something as well_ , says the treacherously intrusive thought. A floorboard wouldn’t care if it were heard, a floorboard would creak happily away even if the tenant of the next room heard it and froze in her steps.

The attic is hushed, and Lola tries to ignore the muttering at the back of her heard that says the reason it is hushed is that it doesn’t want to be spotted.

She could call Mattie. She could stand here and scream and Mattie would come and laugh at her fears and spend the rest of the evening rolling her eyes and dropping dark hints about how she hadn’t gone into babysitting as a career.

But if she screams she will be admitting she is afraid. And right now, she is more scared of being scared than of anything else. Which is worse: that there is something following her? Or that there is something in her head making her think that she is being followed?

There is a soft hissing sound, like the rushing in your ears when you’re going to faint. Is she going to faint? Because that sound could also be the brushing of somebody up against the wall in the other room, somebody trailing herself along the wood panelling. She takes a step backwards and feels herself pushing up against the blackboard. A stub of chalk, knocked off its ledge, falls to the floor.

Perhaps if this is all in her head, she just needs to put something else in there as well to fight it.

Slowly she bends down and picks the piece of chalk up. Crouching down, moving crab-wise across the floor, she draws a wide circle around her. When it is joined up she throws a glance at the skylight, makes a wild guess as to where north is and begins marking the compass points. She works from a confused memory of her ineffectual witchcraft days. Sigils for north, south, east and west. An elaborate star in the centre and all around the edges a trailing inscription in half-a-dozen different writing systems (none of them, she is sure, recognizable to the cultures that first produced them). She completes the circle and stands straight up in the middle with her feet on the star and concentrates.

This amateur witchcraft stuff is all nonsense from your past, whispers a treacherous voice.

This being haunted by something I can't see is all nonsense from my past, she growls back. 

The attic is hushed, and Lola tells herself that the reason it is hushed is that she has driven everything away.

It might be a fiction. But if it is a fiction then so was the presence stalking her from the other side of the wall. Either way, she steps out of her circle and walks calmly down the stairs, being very careful not to look in the room next door.

* * *

“Darling, I’m home!” Mattie proclaims theatrically as she enters the kitchen the following evening. She carries an insulated bag slung over her shoulder.

Lola turns to greet her, spoon in hand. “Blood bank a success? Put them on the bottom if you could, I want the top shelf clear,” she adds as Mattie opens the fridge and begins stacking the newly-acquired blood bags.

“Most satisfactory. That _nice_ Monsieur Lefebvre has sorted out a system to keep me supplied all summer and I only had to threaten the lives of his family twice.”

“How… charming. What family does he have?”

“Oh goodness, I’ve no idea! But I don’t think he knows that.” She winds her way to inspect the bubbling pots. Lola shoos her out of the way. There are herbs that need to be added.

“That’s a tomato soup on the left. The right was meant to be chicken in wine, but there was less left in the bottle than I thought, so it’s chicken in a generically savoury sauce.”

Mattie hoists herself up onto the counter. “Do anything bizarre while I was out?”

“I started sorting out the other downstairs rooms. I found a gramophone and some old records! There's quite a lot of Brahms, and also some Wagner.”

“And are you now going to turn your nose up at my having done so little tidying in six decades that this is news to me?”

Lola does her best impression of a witheringly disapproving smile. “Oh yes. It's no way to live, Mattie. You should take responsibility for your dwelling. A clean house is the first step to a clean life. Straighten up and fly right, young lady.” She wags her finger and Mattie snorts in laughter.

“Well, now we know. Brahms will be nice. Any idea about what to do with the Wagner?” Mattie leans across to the oven and lifts out the wooden spoon from the pan of bright red soup. She tastes it appreciatively and Lola has to stop to wonder why that is so worth watching.

“None whatsoever. I would have suggested use them as coasters but we've got plenty enough of those already.”

After dinner, they close the French windows to keep insects from being lured in from the dusk. Mattie launches into a story from her past while Lola finishes the background of her cross-stitch and begins picking out the first of the leaves and stems. There will be a rose, and a thistle, and a dandelion. She suspects they wouldn't really all be in flower in the same season but that is besides the point.

Between stitches, she glances up at Mattie’s face. Expressions slide across it smoothly, keeping pace with the twists and turns of her tale. It is as fascinating to watch her as to listen, and Lola finds herself taking longer and longer pauses. Finally she gives up, puts the embroidery down and just watches, hands folded under her chin.


	3. Eleatic

Lola sits at her dressing table and lays out in her mind the complex mixture of truth and fiction she has allowed her parents to receive.

_Dear Mother and Father,_ she writes.

_Thank you for your letter, it was nice to hear from you. I’m afraid there isn’t any internet here and phone reception is ~~not very good~~ non-existent (which is why I haven’t called)._

_We have a little cottage in the middle of nowhere with a small garden,_ she continues looking out of her window at the acres of grounds that surround the manor house, _which Laura is doing yoga in at this very moment. Carmilla doesn’t like the sun, so she is lolling around under a giant parasol._

She should probably stick with that story and not introduce any further characters, but either residual honesty or something else compels her to introduce another character to the story.

_Carmilla’s (adopted) sister is staying with us for a bit. She was rather rude at first, but is actually quite nice under it all. She is very fashionable and will probably be a high-powered businesswoman one day._

After all, she probably _will_ be going to do some of that in the future.

_You probably wouldn’t approve of her all that much. I don’t think I approve of her either but I can’t help liking her all the same._

With an effort Lola wrenches her flow of words off Mattie and back to the subject of her life.

_In answer, I’m afraid I don’t know what I’m going to do when the summer is over. All the chaos on campus rather took away from the career planning._

Her parents know nothing about the Dean possessing her. All they have been told is that a terrible earthquake isolated the campus and the Dean got involved in a feud with a local nobleman. That worried them quite enough.

_Maybe I’ll do postgraduate work._

At what point did that start sounding like a career plan?

_I spoke to the Chair of the Board (who’s taken over as the new Dean) a little while ago –_

(Over breakfast, in fact)

_– and she says she’s hoping to capitalize on the University’s strengths by establishing several interdisciplinary postgraduate courses combing literature and occult sciences (you remember how interested I used to be in mythology?), and that I would be just what she’s looking for._

“Darling, you are literally the only person who can get inside Mother’s secret archive without the books trying to eat them, so you could get tenure if you fancied asking for it.”

_The new head librarian seems to have taken a shine to me as well._

“Miss Perry, may I say that I would be delighted were you to choose to remain at Silas and if there’s anything I can do-“

_So I have some prospects. None of them are quite what I thought I might be doing when I came to Silas, but times change and we change with them._

_Love, Lola._

* * *

Lola settles into the quantity-surveying internal monologue that always takes over when cleaning. The side table there is about halfway between this wall and that wall, so when she has dealt with four of the six pieces of furniture on this side of the room, she will be two-thirds of the way through the second half, which is five-sixths of the way through the whole thing. And that means she will have dealt with the whole mothballed parlour by eleven o’clock, which will give her time to start on beating the dust out of the rugs she found in the attic before she need return to the kitchen to do something about the salad for lunch.

Happiness. 

The ground floor of the house has nearly been completed, the dust banished and the furniture restored to its original condition. She has smoothed drying wood with balm, polished tarnished metal, made windows fully transparent again. No doubt the whole thing will fall into disrepair once more after the summer is over, but for now she is creating order around her and she is happy.

There is plenty of summer left, she observes peacefully. After two weeks the ground floor is nearly done – say a week and a half of work since she was slow to start in case Mattie objected to her taking possession of the place. So maybe the same for the first floor, and then again for the top floor. Although the windows further up will be slower to do, so rounding up-

There is a soft sound of brushing fabric from the door indicating the presence of Mattie. She doesn’t have to turn around to know that – she remembers clearly that Mattie had been wearing a linen top at breakfast, airy, rumpled and slightly transparent. She has found herself becoming increasingly observant of the vampire’s wardrobe for reasons she does not particularly feel the need to explore.

No doubt Mattie is more amused than anything else about her own more piecemeal wardrobe. That – obviously – must be the reason for the prickling sensation between her bare shoulder-blades that indicates to her the direction of Mattie’s fixed gaze.

“Five-sixths,” she says with satisfaction, giving the top of the coffee table a final polish.

“Five-sixths?” enquires Mattie.

“Of the way through the room,” she explains. She rises from her knees on the floor, turns and stretches. “And one-sixth to go.”

“You’ll never get there, Lola,” Mattie smiles. Lola frowns, not understanding. “If you’re dividing the room up in order to work through it you’ll never get there. First you have to get half-way, yes?”

Lola nods, and suddenly Mattie takes a balletic leap into the middle of the floor. She lands on one foot, smoothly restores her balance, and comes to attention halfway between Lola and the door.

“And then you’ve got halfway to go. Yes? But to do that, my dear, you’ll first need to get halfway through the remaining distance.” She takes a long stride, half-crossing the distance to the coffee table, and stands a yard away from Lola’s still confused expression.

“But you’re still not there!” She purses her lips theatrically. She’s enjoying this far too much, thinks Lola. “So – if you’re still trying to get there you’ll need to get halfway through what’s left.”

Realisation creeps over Lola as Mattie takes a smart step forward, ending up eighteen inches in front of her. “And then halfway again and halfway again?” she asks.

“Precisely. So you’ll never get there – you’ll just get closer and closer.” A smirk creeps up one side of Mattie’s face, and she shuffles closer still. Lola’s eyes dart down to her smiling lips.

“So nobody can ever be caught by someone chasing them?” she asks quietly.

“Depends whether you believe in paradoxes.” She crosses half the intervening inches until Lola can feel the heat radiating off her. 

“How do you close the distance, then? If it takes too many steps?” She breathes the question. Mattie's scent of aromatic wood is enveloping her, and it makes thinking difficult.

“All at once, Lola. You do it all at once.” She can see the fine texture of her lips speaking these words, watch the precise way Mattie's face dimples.

“If you trust thought experiments, anyway.” Abruptly Mattie dances backwards and turns around. Lola watches her drift languidly out of the room.

Mattie is a contradiction. She plays games - and drinks blood. She gushes about favourite novels - and alludes to the pleasures of murder. She has founded theatres – and slaughtered convents. She teases Lola like they’re childhood friends – and then looks at her like she wants to eat her.

Every time Lola thinks she is getting some kind of a grasp on her, she recedes just a little further.

* * *

Mattie tells tales in the evening while Lola knits.

In Jerusalem in the waning years of the Crusading kings, there was a square called the Court of Crows. None of the inhabitants of the surrounding houses would give a reason for this and although crows would occasionally feed there, it was no more often than in any other part of the city. It was a small, cramped place barely deserving of the name of 'court' – it was more truly a place where an alley became briefly wider. Three houses opened onto the square. In one lived a Greek merchant who had a beautiful daughter. In a second lived a knight from Toulouse who had married a _poulaine_ , one of the children born to Crusader fathers and eastern mothers. And in the third lived a woman all on her own. She was rarely seen on the street, but when she ventured forth she clad herself from head to toe in silks of deepest blue and richest red.

One day when she was returning from paying a visit, the merchant's daughter stumbled in the street. A handsome man helped her up but before she could smile at him, he had seized the necklace from around her neck and run. She arrived home distraught. Her father was angry at her for losing the valuable jewels and still more angry that she had no idea who the young man might have been. In a desperate attempt to describe someone she found herself depicting the only young man to whom she paid any attention - who was the son of the knight next door, her secret sweetheart.

The merchant and the knight came to blows over this and neither the knight's son nor the merchant's daughter were able to dissuade them, nor was the girl's attempt to explain her mistake believed. And, afraid to reveal their love, the two youths were separated. Now, the merchant's daughter one evening climbed out of her window and hauled herself up onto the roof. In happier times this was how she had met the knight's son, but tonight she sat weeping for her fate. But as she looked up from her weeping she was startled to find a woman sitting on the roof across from her. And the woman complained of the girl's tears scaring 'her little birds' away and threatened her - which of course only made the girl cry more. Finally the woman demanded in exasperation to know what would stop her distress and the merchant's daughter poured out the tale of the necklace.

Three days later the merchant came down to breakfast and found the stolen necklace laid on his kitchen table. Wondering whether the knight's son had returned his property he hurried into the square – but there he found the knight and his son already outside their house. On the paving slabs was the body of a young man. His neck had been torn open as if by a wild animal and all over his body crows were tearing at the exposed flesh. Across the stones in his own blood was written _thief_ in swirling Arabic. 

“What happened to the girl?” Lola wants to know. Mattie performs as much of a shrug as is possible with a wineglass in hand.

“She married the boy after the parents decided the return of the necklace was an omen. A couple of years later Salah ad-Din took the city, so if she survived the bombardment I'd imagine she left with the refugees – widowed in all probability given her husband's occupation. But I don't know – Mother called and I was halfway to Smyrna by then.”

Lola doesn't want to hear that part of the story.

“Well, it was very... generous of you. If somewhat bloody.” She flicks out the coil of wool in her lap to stop it getting knotted around her needles.

“A matter of practicality, darling. Quiet neighbours are good neighbours, and if you want to avoid people poking into your business it's best to keep the same set around you.”

“You haven't struck me as the discreet type before, really.”

Mattie beams at her. “Oh, these days I have more _presence_ , do you think? True, vampires become more formidable with age. I was barely two hundred years old at the time, you know, and still a harmless little kitten.” How such a creature as Mattie can manage to make doe eyes Lola will never understand.

“And when you got older?”

The structure of Andalusia crumbled in the desultory criss-crossing wars. With the Emperor gone to prepare for Russia, the French had lost vigour; the British were focused on Portugal; the Spanish regulars were demoralised; the local guerillas were more interested in stealing chickens than fighting anyone. In the vacuum, things crept through the cracks and took up their abodes. There was one remote valley with a despoiled abbey beside a dry stream bed, and from this abbey huddled figures were seen coming and going at night.

Before the war had come through the province, but when it was clearly coming, there had been knocks on the door of half a dozen notable citizens and a dozen minor ones in the county. The disturbed inhabitants had opened them to find a messenger – a dark woman wrapped in a black cloak, they said – with bags of gold. There were _books_ in the province, they were told and the way she said the word made very clear to the locals what _books_ were meant - those scattered when the abbey by the dry stream was forcibly broken up a century before. Marshal Victor was coming, they were told. Marshal Victor was coming with all his men and a wise person would leave without encumbering themselves. Gold travelled better than books, and paid its own way. And some of the locals sold their property and some did not, receiving threats instead of gold.

But the Marshal could move men and horses faster than a gambler snatches up cards and before the threats could be made good on the valley was filled with ten thousand French soldiers clambering over the countryside and squatting in the ruins. They stayed a month and then moved on.

When they had gone, a quiet doctor surveyed his village with a mixture of grief and relief. Much was damaged; little was destroyed. The food stocks were depleted; his family was intact. He still guarded his precious library of rare texts – although truth be told he was more devoted to his commonplace editions of Plato than to the rarities he had secreted under a floorboard. Three days after the departure of the soldiers he came home to find his house burst open. His family were gone and a demand was nailed to the headboard of his bed: _The books. The abbey. Tomorrow night._

He retrieved his books from their hiding place and rode to the ruined abbey, arriving in the fiery light of sunset. There, like a queen holding court, sat the woman in the black cloak. She had taken a niche of masonry for her throne and held in her clawed hand a golden goblet. The doctor laid the books at her feet and begged for the release of his family. But the woman laughed and cast the goblet at his feet, spilling the stones with blood. She ordered him to turn around and he saw to his horror his wife and daughter bound high up on the walls with iron shackles, bloody wounds gleaming on their bare limbs and necks.

When he awoke from his faint, he found himself lying on the stones of the abbey chapel. Next to him was a bag of gold. His wife and daughter were with him, pale and drawn but alive. Neither would ever speak of what had happened to them, save to tell him that there had been other people summoned to the abbey who had thought to confront the woman and not bring their books - and that these people were buried in the graveyard. The doctor used some of the gold to pay a priest to go to the abbey graveyard and perform the necessary prayers for their souls, but he did not do this until a year had gone by.

Lola is silent after this story. Mattie watches her face intently but she does not look away from her eyes.

“How many?” she asks eventually. 

“Three died for not bringing their books. They all told me where to find them by the end.” She does not smile, but she does not look ashamed.

“Their families?”

“Were no use to me. I set them free when I had drunk enough.” She pauses. “Do you think I'm a monster?”

“Yes,” Lola breathes.

“Good. I am one. Do you care that I'm a monster?”

But Lola has no answer for that.

* * *

It is cooler today and Lola is exploring the woods. They are not expansive or thick - rather a few acres of timber cut through with looping grass paths, halfway towards being a maze. Somewhere at the centre, Mattie says, is a sundial, and she has determined to find it. There is a stiffer breeze blowing than there has been and the appearance of clouds in the sky might presage rain as an oncoming relief from the heat, but she is near enough to the house not to have brought any preparations.

The trees do not quite meet overhead. They are tall and elegant ashes and slender beeches. The dappled light plays about her in flutterings of green and yellow, and there are birds too, magpies high up in the trees scolding each other and sparrows launching themselves off the ground before her approach. The growing wind has driven away the insects.

As she walks, she contemplates Mattie. She is spending more and more time contemplating Mattie recently. There is a lot to think about: her history (pleasant and unpleasant), the endless unexpected whorls of her personality, the way her eyes seem to go on forever getting deeper and deeper. Sometimes she comes into the room so quietly that Lola cannot hear her and stalks closer and closer like she is hunting.

Mattie tells stories about hunting, and Lola is finding herself admiring the woman's power and strength more than she is pitying the poor victims. _That_ , she reminds herself, is probably something that many of her victims did themselves, like rodents charmed by snakes.

The wind is beginning to pick up when she looks through the screen of trees ahead to see a shadow move across them, as if somebody were on the other side. Her first thought is sudden, irrational terror. Her second thought is that she is being foolish: this is Mattie’s garden too. She has simply come out to join her. Her third thought is that Mattie knew she was going into the woods and chose not to come with her. So this may not be her after all; or if it is, she has come in secret.

Lola walks towards the intervening trees, trying to peer between the trunks to catch a glimpse of her companion, but they have rounded a corner and disappeared. She looks wildly at the T-junction she has come to, and takes a right. Down the avenue she walks, and listens out for a crack of twigs breaking underfoot.

This shouldn't be happening. Not now. She has been doing so well, she's been fine since the incident in the attic. She thought she'd beaten this.

A flurry of wings from behind makes her whip around. A pair of wood pigeons have whirled upward from a tree some way behind her. A moment later they are followed by a magpie – something has startled them. She turns their back on them and picks up her pace. The path loops round, almost doubling back on itself and she sees through the trees on her left another rolling shadow. Mattie’s? She is not sure, and so keeps going. It does not escape her notice, or the attention of the whispering fear in her mind, that the figure moving so apparently gently has gone further than she herself has.

But it can't catch me up! She protests to herself. It will have to go halfway first!

If she believes in paradoxes.

She takes a breath and calls Mattie’s name. There is no reply, but when more birds arise cawing and croaking from directly behind her she breaks into a hurried half-run. She darts back a glance before she reaches the fork ahead. There is- there is something back there. It could be a figure wrapped in black, or it could be some shadow thrown forward by a leaning tree. But it is not Mattie – or if it is, she is not answering to her name.

Lola wonders how much she really knows about the woman. They seem to have reached a state of friendship over the past week and she has not until this moment doubted that this was genuine. Now the old fears creep back in. Is this a game to Mattie? All the first stages of a chase, to be consummated here in the maze-like turns of her own hunting park?

Or is this the creature who was been haunting her dreams and the corner of her eye, the creature with her own face? She doesn’t want to meet her own image. Her own image is tarnished now, it has been worn by another.

Sunlight, fading in and out with the coming clouds, opens up around her as she runs into the clearing. The sundial stands at the centre, a great block of the same honey-coloured stone the house is made of surmounted by a spike of iron. She grasps onto it as if to a lifebelt. The shadow under the great iron needle is beginning to grow fuzzy as the clouds are blown in. 

Just through the circle of trees surrounding the open space her hunter is approaching, visible as hints of a moving form seen through holly bushes and rounding the corner. 

“Lola!” calls Mattie as she enters the clearing.

She is silent, unable either to flee or to run to her.

“Lola,” Mattie repeats, coming to join her at the sundial. “I heard you call. What is it?”

“You… heard me call?”

“Of course, darling - vampire hearing. Just a few minutes ago – did you get lost?”

It is all too silly. There hadn’t been anyone until she tried to see who was there, and then the only person following her was doing so in answer to her own call. Lola can feel the fear mixing with hilarity.

“Lola?” Mattie moves to her side and lays a hand upon hers. Before she can manage to get out an explanation she has collapsed into her arms. She is crying and laughing and cannot quite see where one ends and the other begins. 

Mattie strokes her hair while she buries her face against her chest. When finally she draws away, the thought sparks in her mind that it was _because_ Mattie came hunting her that she now feels so safe.

“Coming back to the house?” Mattie asks. “There’s a thunderstorm blowing in.”

* * *

The rain is lashing down outside, and they have even lit a fire. Tomorrow morning will be cool and fresh, and in the afternoon the heat will have returned to transfigure the dampened garden into a steaming sauna. Mattie sits on one side of the sofa, a book open in her lap. Lola sits beside her making a vague pretence of embroidery.

There are other chairs in the room. Mattie has always taken the sofa, but there are circles of depressed carpet that testify to the shifting positions of Lola's chair. There, on the other side of the room, is the chair she sat in the first night before making her excuses and retiring as early as possible. Opposite the two women is the chair she moved to when conversation with Mattie became more interesting than avoiding her. Then the chair next to the sofa. Now, finally, on the left of Mattie herself with no intruding armrest.

“Balzac?”

“Yes. _Sarrasine_.” 

There is a sort of aware openness to their talk this evening. It reminds Lola of the moment before an exam, when everyone knows what is about to happen and has accepted that it is too late to change it. Preparations have been made. Turn over your papers now. Write down your answer without second thoughts, because you will never be in a better position than right now.

“More masked balls and attempted seductions?”

“Not quite a masked ball – not exactly. Seductions? Yes, of a sort.”

Lola can feel that word coming off Mattie's lips.

“Have you ever met one of those women whose dazzling beauty resists encroaching age?” asks Mattie, and Lola cannot understand until she realises that she is reading out loud from the story in front of her. “The passions of such a woman's soul illuminate her radiant face: her every feature radiates intelligence and each mark has a special glow, particularly in the light.”

Lola puts down her embroidery.

“Her eyes attract, reject, speak or are silent; her deportment is artlessly elegant-”

She shuffles closer to Mattie, who turns her position to face her, the book held loosely in her right hand.

“A raised eyebrow, a glance of the eye, a curl of the lip can instil a kind of terror-”

Lola leans over. There is less than an inch between them, and only a few inches between her lips and Mattie's as she speaks the story.

“Is the one who loves such a siren not risking their life?”

The gap between them seems suddenly so wide. How do you cross it, then, if it takes too many steps? Her eyes dart up to Mattie's, as the woman ceases her recitation and drops the book onto the floor. There is a silence between them.

All at once, Lola remembers, and she raises her mouth to be kissed.


	4. Ma Petite Lola

Lola wakes in the late morning. The sky is clear once more and the sun is high, but the day is cool in the aftermath of last night's storm. She is curled around Mattie's still sleeping body. Her right hand, placed neatly at the base of Mattie's ribcage with its fingers touching the hollow between her breasts, rises and falls gently with the woman's breathing.

She opens her eyes but does not shift her body. There are pleasant aches here and there in her legs and sides. Somewhere on the left side of her neck is a dull throbbing that indicates the spot where Mattie finally bit her the previous night. Mattie's bedroom smells of sex and of Mattie herself – to Lola this morning, those two scents are much the same. Over the rising and falling of the woman's chest she can see a dressing table piled high with a jumble of bottles and jars.

Mattie's hair is tangled and Lola realises she has never seen her before with even a single hair out of place. Even skulking in the cellar of the Dean's house between patrols she still somehow managed to maintain the illusion of just having stepped out from a soiree. The messiness is attractive. 

“Good morning, Lola.” Mattie's eyes open and she turns her head to meet her. Lola is momentarily unsure of what to do, how to pick up the reins after the unprecedented night, but then she is shuffling over to plant a kiss on Mattie's lips and the moment of awkwardness is gone. Suddenly the day seems to open up around her, and the weeks and weeks of the summer still to come are laid out in front of her, and all of them to spend in this new place they have entered. She stretches out in the bed happily before returning to her position curled around Mattie.

“Good morning, Mattie.” Something twitches in her memory and she can't help herself from continuing. “You're probably wondering what I'm doing here, right? Aren't I supposed to be off dusting the kitchen? Well - yes.”

“It's just,” she continues as Mattie's expression of bafflement starts to give way to recognition, “the thought of leaving _our_ bed for some cleaning- I just, I couldn't. So, I stayed here. Dozed. Enjoyed the company. Only... when I opened my eyes there was an ancient vampire in bed with me and I am scared that something very, very remarkable is happening-”

“Darling,” growls Mattie, “I can pretty much guarantee it.” Lola giggles, unreasonably pleased with herself.

“Sleep well, my dear?”

“I think we have mosquitoes. I woke up with these two great bloody marks on my neck.”

“It's no wonder, darling. You do encourage them. All that wandering round in tank tops 'because it's too hot'.” Mattie smirks and Lola wonders how much longer the woman has been conscious of their developing relationship than she herself has been.

“Anyway, now that I won't be waking you up, I think I'd like to take a shower.” Mattie arises languidly and drifts to the door. She seems unconscious of her own nakedness, and Lola watches peacefully the play of sunlight and shadows on her skin. There are some light scratches on her upper back. She moves out of the room almost like a cat, rising up on the balls of her feet and pacing quietly into the corridor.

Lola rolls over to curl herself up in the space left by Mattie. She feels obscurely, yet not unpleasantly, as if she has a hangover – no headache, but there is the same feeling of moments from the previous night jolting back into memory.

There was the kiss, slow at first and then deepening as the two of them wound their bodies around each other, and then there was the grasping at limbs and pulling at hems until the undignified flight to somewhere more convenient. Then at last there was the bed and Lola's hurrying to pull each wisp of cloth out of the way before it could slow even for a moment Mattie's unrelenting progress.

The muscles and tendons of Mattie's neck and back were finely picked-out, individually tangible to the lightest touch. Lola found her way through them, followed the spiralling path along her arms to kiss her long fingers and then back again to the softness of her breasts.

And then the revelation of Mattie's perfect body, all strength and elegance, being coursed through with what she – she, Lola, herself – was doing to it. Hands twining through her curled hair, urging her on to the final yielding.

But Lola discovered in herself a reserve of desire she had not suspected and in the throwing back of heads and the tossing of limbs she found herself pushing her hair out of the way, baring her neck and drawing Mattie in for the killing stroke. She felt it everywhere at once, her blood rising like sap to the wounds at her neck - and with it the blossoming of pleasure until Mattie drew back, her mouth stained red and Lola could only throw herself forward to kiss wildly through the taste of her own blood.

All this memory comes back in fits and starts as if her surprised consciousness can only process the momentous events at a slow rate.

“What do you think, Lola?” Mattie drifts in through the door and meanders over to the wardrobe. Her hair is damp and loose from the shower. “White or black today?” She pulls two light and flowing dresses from their hangers and holds each in turn against her still naked body.

Lola points to the white one, long and floating. A dress for lazy summer days, for drifting in and out of each other's arms.

“But don't put it on yet, right?”

* * *

Lola paces up and down in the dusty little upstairs room that is the only one to receive phone signal.

“Perry! Hi!” Laura is sounding chirpy, even over the phone. “How are you doing?”

“I’m good. I’m good. How are you doing? Actually, where are you at the moment?” She realises that she hasn't heard anything from Laura and Carmilla for over a week and doesn't actually know where their meandering journey across Europe has taken them.

“We’re in Prague – Carmilla got us sorted in a really nice hotel right by the river. Been here for the last four days. What’s your place like? And how are you getting on with Mattie?”

“It’s... pretty wonderful. You’d like it a lot, really lovely gardens. I've told my parents you're doing a lot of yoga in them. Um – is Carmilla there?”

“Yeah, she’s slumping on the sofa and scowling like a massive useless vampire.” This is clearly directed pointedly at Carmilla herself.

“Can I talk to her?”

Laura pauses. “Uh – yeah, sure. Is everything OK?” Lola makes an affirmative but nondescript noise and hears Laura saying something to Carmilla. There is a fumbling as the phone is passed over.

“Morning, Betty Crocker,” Carmilla drawls in her low register. Lola shoots a glimpse at her watch. Two in the afternoon, even in Prague. Mind you, shortly after Carmilla likes to wakes up, hence ‘morning’ to her.

“Hello, Carmilla. I…” she trails off, not sure how to begin.

“Out with it, curly, before I get bored. Something wrong with you?” She pauses, obviously trying to guess. “Something wrong with Mattie?” There is a note of concern in the second question.

“No, we’re – we’re fine. We’re very fine. I just wanted to talk to you about things being fine between us. As in, there’s a sort of us for things to be fine between if you see what I mean and-” she tails off into indecision again.

“Wait, what?”

“Mattie and I are – which is to say that we’ve – you know, the two of us are...”

“Oh God. Don’t tell me that you, Anne Shirley, are trying to spit out the news that you and my sister are – what? An item?” There is a faint shout of ‘oh my God, what?’ from Laura in the background.

“…yes.” Lola shuffles her feet.

Carmilla lets out a low whistle. “Well fuck me sideways. Didn’t think you had it in you, Perry.”

“Me neither.”

“So please tell me this isn’t a call where you boast about your newly-deflowered life. Or newly-devoured life, or whatever.”

“No, it’s not. Actually, I was kind of stressing out and I wanted your advice.” Things Lola never thought she would say to Carmilla, she reflects.

“Cupcake?” Carmilla stays on the phone, but raises her voice for Laura to hear. “Cupcake, I hold you personally responsible for introducing me to this strange new hell as a relationship counsellor.”

“Do you think this is sensible?”

“Fuck no,” she snickers and Lola catcher her breath. “But who the hell cares? Neither was freeing the Queen of the Fairies, banishing said Queen, staking my excuse for a brother, getting possessed or trying to melt Mattie alive. Life like that, you got to give up on sensible.”

“And Mattie? I know she tried to talk you out of a relationship with Laura because of her being human…”

“Well, you know Mattie. Consistency is of no interest to her, and for someone who likes telling others what to do she’s damn good at ignoring her own rules.”

“I’d spotted that.”

“This is the woman who took a look at the blood of an anglerfish god and thought ‘yeah, I don’t mind changing out of all recognition if it’ll be fun and I get to kill more people’.”

“Well. Maybe you’re right.” Lola thinks to herself. “Maybe _she’s_ right. About the changing bit, not the killing bit.”

“Can’t make that choice for you, Anne Shirley. How you doing anyway? Mother not come knocking?”

“No, it’s all clear and empty here.” Lola notices as she says so that perhaps for the first time she really assumes this to be true. Not believes it with reservations and fears, but actually assumes it to be true at a basic level.

“Well, there you are then. You found out something new about yourself, so don’t go trying to backtrack and be normal, right?” Her words are short, but Lola can hear a note of seriousness in them. 

“Right.”

“Now go and talk to Laura before I throw up from being nice. Catch!” There is a thunk as the phone lands in Laura’s hand.

“Hey again Perry! Gossip now, please!”

Lola tries to explain, backtracking over the past few weeks. Somehow the experience seems more comprehensible, more inevitable now that it is all laid out behind her for Laura’s questions and comments.

Laura is full of news as well. What she actually talks about is a flood of cities, landmarks, art galleries she’s been dragged to. But what comes through the happy chatter is something else, a sense that her relationship with Carmilla is steadying itself and finding a firmer foundation. The two have a lot to discover about each other. So far that seems to have been a positive exploration.

“I think she's actually feeling slightly lost at the moment,” admits Laura when Carmilla has apparently sloped off to mess up the shower as only she knows how. “I mean, she's spent three hundred years utterly dominated by her mother and now that's over. Like leaving home, only a dozen times more disorienting.”

“Yeah. And Mattie too, maybe.” Lola feels suddenly that she should have spotted this earlier. “I mean, Mattie's had a more independent run of things, but it's still got to be a big change.”

“Best watch out for that,” Laura says seriously. “I hear women of a certain age going through big changes in life are often prone to do drastic things and take up with younger partners.” Her laughter is infectious and Lola finds herself smiling broadly even when they have stopped.

“Have you told LaF yet?”

“No, not yet. I wanted to talk to Carmilla first. I'll call them in a bit. No actually, I'll wait. I don't want to be that person who reminds everyone incessantly that they're seeing someone.”

I'm seeing someone, she thinks as she puts the phone back in her pocket. Everyone, meet Mattie. My... girlfriend? Ladyfriend. Gal Pal. Partner. Lover. Hunter. Predator.

* * *

“ _Catherine found herself alone in the gallery before the clocks had ceased to strike. It was no time for thought; she hurried on, slipped with the least possible noise through the folding doors, and without stopping to look or breathe_ \- oh, God!” she breaks off into a gasp.

“Come along, Lola. I'm just aching to hear what Catherine's going to do next.” Mattie presses a kiss to the side of her jaw and nudges the book with her left hand. Her right hand continues its slow meanderings between her legs. Lola sucks her breath in and continues.

“ _... rushed forward to the one in question. The lock yielded to her hand, and, luckily, with no sullen sound that could alarm a human being. On tiptoe she entered; the room was before her-_ ” a rasp of Mattie's thumb over her clit breaks through her monologue and a wordless cry escapes her mouth. She tries to turn and kiss Mattie but the vampire squirms away and nods at _Northanger Abbey_.

“ _but it was – but it was some minutes before she could advance_ – fuck, Mattie – _advance another_ -” Mattie snickers at her increasingly fractured attempts to keep the narrative going. “ _step. She beheld what fixed her to the spot and_ -”

Lola controls herself, draws a deep breath. “ _and agitated every feature. She saw a large_ – Mattie – _a large_ – fuck, right there – _well-proportioned apartment, an handsome dimity_ -” but that sentence disappears into moans.

“ _bed, arranged as with_ oh fuck Mattie, please!”

“Lola, I have to be very strict with you here.” Mattie's voice is an ocean of warmly amused satisfaction at her handiwork. “It required a certain ingenuity to find English editions of your beloved Jane Austen here in rural Limousin, and I do think you might remember that it was your idea to introduce me to them.” She slips her left hand under Lola's dressing gown to perform its own explorations.

“ _arranged as unoccupied with an housemaid's care, a bright Bath stove, mahogany wardrobes,_ ” she shudders as Mattie's fingers part her folds fully and slide inside her, “ _and neatly-painted chairs, on which the warm beams of a western sun gaily poured through two sash windows! Catherine had expected to have her feelings w_ – ah! - _worked, and w- and worked they were._ ” She drops the book and reaches behind her to grab hold of Mattie, dragging her head forward to kiss her cheek.

“You're the most vicious creature on earth,” she informs Mattie, who beams at this compliment and sets to work with renewed effort. Mattie, she is learning, likes to talk. She likes to ask everything – from trivia Lola has almost forgotten right up to the kind of questions she usually cannot even phrase to herself let alone answer. But with Mattie's hands and mouth as tireless as each other, the answers eventually come tumbling out in babbles and gasps.

“No!” she protests, and is rewarded with Mattie's fingers splaying out in just the right place. “Not answering!” she declares - with less vigour. But then flipped on her back with Mattie's mouth refusing to budge from her clit, the answer seems easier to give. “In the shower, all right? And no more than once a day – fuck! Twice a day at most.”

The smile on Mattie's face could light up distant objects.

“One day you're going to run out of confessions to extract,” Lola tells her when they have stopped for the moment.

“Oh, I don't think so,” muses Mattie, tracing interlacing patterns across Lola's bare stomach. “There's plenty here to amuse myself with.”

“Amuse?”

“People make the best amusements, darling. They don't wear out for ages, and you can never entirely figure them out.” She has a way of looking at Lola which is rather proprietary. Somehow Lola doesn't mind it in the slightest.

“Matska Belmonde, are you admitting you have a less than totally contemptuous overview of the human condition?” Mattie waves off that accusation.

“Well, you can't be a predator without prey. Similarly, there's no way to be a vampire without an... audience.” She mimes a bow. 

“Particularly a drama queen such as yourself,” Lola points out.

“Hmm. Well, in the _long_ term I'm going to do things to you that will make you sorry you said that,” Lola snorts at the empty threat “but in the _immediate_ term-” she kisses her pertly on the cheek. “I am sufficiently enchanted by how filthy your mouth gets when you're at simmering point to let it pass for now. There is something exceptionally charming in how much you can be made to swear.”

“One has to save these things for when they'll have most effect. Also,” Lola adds with precision, “it's a matter of correct proportion – the right words for the right time. Not swearing during sex would be quite as rude as doing so in the ordinary course of life.”

Mattie stares at her blankly for a moment before bursting out laughing. “As I've said before Lola, you are a most curious creature.”

* * *

“Bonjour!”

The girl in the épicerie waves happily at Lola as she enters with a ringing of the bell. She wears her black hair in a heavy plait lying over her shoulder and finishing in a decorated knot on the face of her apron. Lola smiles at her pretty freckled face.

“Bonjour!”

The girl watches her curiously as she inspects the shelves full of bottles preserved. “Je ne vous ai pas vu avant, mademoiselle - êtes-vous l'autre femme de rester dans la maison près des bois?”

Lola takes this in and processes it as best she can. It has been a long time since she has spoken French.

“Um... l'autre femme, oui. Je reste avec mon – no, wait - ma amie Mattie,” she pauses, only able to work out one clause of the sentence at a time, “si ce est de qui vous parlez.” I've probably pronounced too many of the consonants, she realises from the wrinkles appearing on the girl's forehead.

“Es-tu anglais? Désolé, je ne pense pas-”

“Non, je suis Allemande. Mon français n'est pas très bon, est-il?” That last phrase is one she knows well, at least.

The girl makes a wry face and concentrates. “Ich glaube mein Deutsch ist...” she tails off and gives up on her search for the German. “pire?”

“Mais je parle anglais, si cela est plus facile.”

The girl's smile springs back. “Oh, good. I had not thought to remember my German after collège, but English I can do. I had not known you were foreign, the other woman – Mattie? - she speaks like she is from Paris.”

“Yes, she's lived there before and still visits often. So you've met her?”

“She comes in here to buy things this summer. Maman says she has owned the house for a long time but never stays for more than a week.”

“What did you think of her?” Lola shoots a sideways glance at the girl.

The girl shuffles uncomfortably. “She is, er. I do not know the words. In French or English.” 

Lola laughs at the girl's discomfort. “Yes, I know what you mean.”

“It is all right for me to say that?” the girl asks. “I think – Mattie, she has spoken of having a guest, and now she smiles very much to say _ma petite Lola_ , so I wondered-” She blushes, and Lola joins her.

“Yes. We are. And don't worry – I was terrified of her when we first met, but she's very nice under it all, mademoiselle..?”

“Aurelie. Then you are very lucky.”

She is.

The way back climbs a gentle slope where the dusty track leads up the hill between two hedges. To each side is a field of ripe wheat, the nodding golden heads visible through gaps in the slowly wilting hedges. The sun is high and shadows are short but intense under its glare. Lola walks slowly, unhurried and unwilling to exert herself in this heat. A flock of small birds dart past her too fast to even distinguish the colours on them. 

She pauses part way up to turn round and look out over the fields and woods between her and the village. The path her is hardly high, but the gentle rise has put her in a position to see some of the countryside spread out before her, greens of the woods and drying golds of the wheatfields. Where she turned onto the path by the junction with the road, there is a patch of dark shadow thrown over the rutted track by a stand of overhanging oaks.

Just as she is about to turn away to resume her journey, a flutter passes across the shadow. She frowns, straining her eyes to determine the shadowed form. She composes herself and, face deliberately calm, continues her journey.

She is cresting the small rise and just beginning to catch the first glimpse of the house of the other side when the consciousness grows in her of a presence on the other side of the left hand hedge. It flickers, darting between the openings and gaps at the very moment Lola cannot look directly at them. It is hard to hear anything in the silences between her footsteps, but there is something not quite intangible there. If she were taller, perhaps she would be able to lean over and see.

Lola stops walking and stares carefully at the hedge. Like the time in Mattie's garden the very first day, there is something about the shadows that is not quite right. But unlike that first day of summer, there are no birds singing undisturbed in the tangled branches.

Carefully she lowers her basket of food onto the ground and stands straight and still, looking ahead. At the very edge of her peripheral vision, there is a shadow that jumps and shudders. Almost a human form.

Lola closes her eyes, spreads her arms wide and allows herself to fall backwards.

Mattie catches her with strong arms wrapping around her waist. Familiar lips press against her neck.

“Welcome home, Lola.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Readers who enjoyed this might be interested in my other two Permonde works: [All the Better to Eat You With](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5349530/chapters/12353057), which is a collection of fairy tales; and [Frumious](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5312081), which is based on _Alice in Wonderland_ and other works by Lewis Carroll.


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